Huguenot

It seems an irrational argument zeban, I could argue that I question your opinion on human rights given that you live in a country that is responsible for the deaths of 500,000 innocent civilians to satisfy your insatiable gluttony for oil. Or I might not, recognising that the only politics you are personally responsible for are your own. ;-)

Indeed, if the wife offered to wrap a drawer around my throat I'd be pressing the big red panic button.

Just watching an episode of Next Generation, and was struck by how rapidly the stars appear to whisk past the starship when you get the external view. In Voyager it was going to take them 75 years to get home at Warp 9 from the Delta Quadrant. However, this seems at odds with the speed of those twinkling lights winging past. Can someone explain where I'm getting it wrong?

The wife just got confused between a tie and a draw. Oddly enough, a tie is often the most spectacular game of cricket. I shall leave it to you and Mr. Google to find out why that should be, and when it has happened in test cricket... ;-)

I'm not aware of a consensus or even a majority on this thread that consider the shopkeeper to have done anything socially unacceptable. I can't be bothered to count numbers, but I reckon it was about even. It's sad, but since we don't have the police resources to target these miscreants, arguing against low level shop-related publicity is in effect arguing that nothing should be done at all. I believe that hanging this rather trivial matter on some elevated 'human rights' principle is allowing intellectual whimsy to overcome pragmatism in the real world.

Work that one past me again Loz - you're saying that because I suggested that some people were being disproportionate, huncamunca decided to prove he wasn't by actually being disproportionate? Besides which, you're not correct. What prompted me to talk about disproportionate response was zeban's equivalence test between the shopkeeper and the death penalty, the suggestion that shoplifters were defenseless mentally ill people (supported by pk), the assertion that "I also like to look up to my local shopkeepers as good moral citizens who are role models to the community so I feel they have a duty to keep personal vendettas away from their businesses." Personal vendetta? Really? That's what prompted my query about disproportionate response. And I'm afraid you're just wrong on citizens being the wrong people to uphold the law. It is wholly and completely the responsiblity of citizens & society to uphold the law, we merely engage a police force to address those crimes of such significance or organisation that only a highly organised force can deal with them. As is so clearly obvious that I'm bored with having to repeat it, we encounter legal transgressions every day in vast numbers, but the majority of people will be lucky to call the police once every five years. If you need an adult version of that - think about drink driving. It wasn't the illegality of the practice that eventually curtailed it, it was a heavily orchestrated campaign to make it socially unacceptable. Let's make shoplifting socially unacceptable shall we? And that starts at home... with the citizen.

"Being a former Systems' Administrator, part of keeping the user base content and informed was that I would explain the nature of any outage and the reasons why." I was right then, you think you know better and you're telling Admin how to do his job ;-) I've no desire to spar with you, I thought you were rude not arrogant.

I wonder what the keyboard version is? I've tried googling it, but all I end up with is spam sites - so emoticons are clearly big draws for web criminals. There's lots of ways to design a finger smiley, but it doesn't actually change into finger smiley automatically on the forum. In the same way that winkey is... ; ) finger smiley is... ?? Bueller.... Bueller... Anyone?

An excellent result after the first innings. We really ground their noses in it in the second innings, it was a shame we let them off the hook a bit with some silly fielding errors in the last hour or so. It'll give them confidence they don't deserve. Decent of Strauss to let Punter get his 50 though.

That inner dialogue...

I don't think you read the thread Loz, here's huncamunca equating pictures of shoplifters with mob revenge on paedophiles: "Theres a bloke down the street, been seen outside the school twice - ive got a pic of him - is it OK to plaster the local lamposts with his mugshot and declare him a peadophile? Obviously hes nevr been convicted or arrested for this offence, but Im assuming from the replies to this thread that we are all up for a bit of this...yes?" I don't need to 'twist' that, and I'm not being disingenuous. Or how about zeban who said that on the basis of my views about shoplifters, she didn't want to live in Singapore because of the death penalty? Why don't you ask her why she chose to conflate the two issues? Neither am I saying that society is on my side, I'm saying that society refuses to pay the taxes required for a police force to adequately pursue these petty criminals. There is no realisitic likelihood that shoplifters "should be put through the courts properly". On that basis either the crimes go unaddressed and proliferate, or they're addressed at a more social level. Anything else is wishful thinking. Your views about 'human rights' clearly play well to the gallery, but they bear no relation to the real world, where Civitas estimates that for every 1,000 thieves, only 2.2 are actually convicted. The programme isn't one that I've created, it's the programme that has been created by our society, where to population is simply not willing to fund pursuit or convictions for petty crime. In that scenario there's two choices, either the rather harmless identification of offenders in shop windows, or sticking your head in the sand because of the 'injustice of it all'.

Apparently... "The estimates of remaining non-renewable worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 10 to the power 24 Joules) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ." So there's six times the amount of energy left in nuclear fuel than there is in fossil fuel. More importantly is that it's more widely distributed, and highly enriched deposits are found in more politically stable countries like Canada and australia.

Larger than this 'average' rabbit... I don't know how people could even imagine putting it where the sun doesn't shine. http://www.animalpictures1.com/data/media/104/Rabbit-16.jpg

You were pretty hard done by there I think pk. It's a pretty standard form of text abuse. -^- *_* -^-

From the Beeb: Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University spent much of the latter half of the 1990s studying the hidden evolutionary signals contained in Lonely Hearts advertisements. Dunbar found that the vast majority of words used by people to describe themselves in ads could be lumped into five different categories. He asked 200 university students to rate the appeal of ads containing different categories of words. When Dunbar analysed the results, he found that men and women attached very different levels of importance to the five categories: Men's preferences 1. Attractiveness 1. Commitment 3. Social Skills 4. Resources 4. Sexiness Women's preferences 1. Commitment 2. Social Skills 3. Resources 4. Attractiveness 5. Sexiness Far from being conditioned to regard these things as important, Dunbar argued that men and women had evolved these preferences over millions of years of evolution. These were crucial qualities that enhanced the fitness of children, and, lest we forget, children are the key to the survival of our species. What hidden messages do we send the opposite sex? Pregnancy and breast-feeding place great stress on a mother, so females make the biggest investment in reproduction. This is why women are choosier about their partners than men, with 20-something women being the choosiest of all. This big parental investment also explains why women seek males who are willing to stick around and provide for children However, when the desire for reproduction is taken out of the equation, preferences change drastically. Dunbar has shown that lesbians were three times less likely to seek resources than heterosexual women. For males, time spent providing for a pregnant partner could be better spent fathering other children with other women. This may explain why men place such a high premium on attractiveness. Attractiveness is a rough indicator of age, and in women, age is a good indicator of fertility. After her late 20s, a woman's fertility steadily declines, and so does her value on the dating market. However, asked to choose one woman as a long-term partner, all three groups chose the beautiful woman regardless of what age they thought she was. "They are saying: 'I'd rather risk a relationship with an older woman who is not going to give me as many children but is very beautiful, than a woman who is more fecund but whose children will be plainer," says Fieldman. The theory is based on the notion that a beautiful woman is more likely to bear beautiful offspring and that those offspring will be more successful than plainer offspring. So I guess that whether physical attraction is important in a relationship depends entirely on what you want out of the relationship. Without a doubt it's got to be important in the 'lust' stage, but it probably gets a lower priority in the 'attraction' and 'attachment' phases If your overall priorities are resources or commitment, then you may not need to go through the 'lust' stage at all - thus negating the necessity for physical attraction.

I agree nashoi. The irony with Three Mile Island is that no-one died as an immediate effect, and there was no evidence of any long term health effects in the aftermath. What probably destroyed confidence in the industry was the bloody film "The China Syndrome" which was released at the same time. It doesn't help when otherwise decent programmes like "The West Wing" sustain and reinforce anti-nuclear convictions by portraying pro-nuclear politicians as misguided piteous clowns. As with climate change deniers, anti-nuclear campaigners tried to sow doubt in the minds of the public by claiming there was a cover-up (something which government is notoriously bad at delivering).

I'll take your word for it Odyssey, but you'll have to take it from me that neither of these sounds like a friendly enquiry from an otherwise charming 'nosy git', they actually sound like a lawyer in cross-examination: "Normally... the Administrator explains the precise nature of the outage" That sounds like your accusing someone of negligence or arrogance. "inform us of the precise nature of the outage" That sounds like you're the boss instructing a naughty boy. A self-elevation I think is just downright rude. All credit to admin for overlooking this clear breach of etiquette. I haven't.

That's a good point Quids. In the world's worst nuclear disaster - Chernobyl - short of 300 people died as a result. Despite Greenpeace's best efforts to prove otherwise, rates of 'associated' diseases (like cancer) in the general public didn't exceed normal rates between affected and unaffected areas. (I pay Greenpeace a direct debit every month, I've got nothing against them). Over 100 people a year die in the oil indsutry in the US alone - extrapolate that globally and I'll be betting it's 1000+ That's if you don't include the 500,000+ deaths in Iraq and at WTC that are directly attributable to the global instability generated by the oil trade. Fear of nuclear is superstitious.

I think the thing that really stands out on behalf of the shopkeeper, is that none of his critics seem able to address the task at hand. His critics talk about 'vigilantism', mobs and pitchforks, accusing people of being paedophiles, violations of human rights - a completely disproportionate escalation of the case at hand. As a society we don't call the police if our kid bullies someone in the playground, or steals a quid from your wallet, we consider this a parochial issue and mete out our own justice proportionately to the crime. We 'imprison' them in their bedroom for the night, we 'fine' them their pocket money, or we dish out 'corporal' punishment with a slap round the legs. Society is unwilling to be taxed to the point that the police have sufficient resources to pursue shoplifters. As a society we've drawn a line about what is 'social' justice, and what needs to go through the courts. Shoplifters are ubfortunately on the same side as misbehaving children. If you don't accept this then I'd like to see you marching on Westminster demanding more taxes. The shopkeepers response to this is not disproportionate, he has neither imprisoned, fined or dished out corporal punishement. Instead he's exposed the perp to public ridicule. So please, stop tossing out these grandiose statements about human rights, stop coming out with crap about paedos, and get with the programme. Not only are you likely to be hypocrites concerning your own children, but you sound absolutely ridiculous.

Oh yes. Oh yes

Louisiana, no pookie, I'm proposing the opposite of a dictatorship, I'm proposing a free market. Exports will become less atractive to overseas customers, because they'll be more expensive, and imports will look less attractive to local customers for the same reason. Don't get all one-sided about this. We'll just be eating more cabbage, which despite Brenda's prejudice is an excellent food. Especially with vinegar and lemon. On bioethanol, no. You're simply wrong on this. It was an interesting experiment that went wrong. As you correctly observe, food prices peaked, riots etc. (maybe not in the UK but certainly where I live). Won't happen again. Game over. We're all going nuclear, whether you like it or not. Especially SMG. On farm machinery we'll all go electric, or hand picking east european vagrants. With pesticides, that's what poo is for. We already have the technology, it's just considered too expensive. I get the idea you're staring down the end of a barrel, and you really don't need to. Air transport and kiwi fruit will be defunct. Sea travel will be very expensive, but railways will continue to deliver through euro-electrical.

"Also in the buy to let market, lanlords can't afford to reduce rents significantly because of their mortgage repayments" Same bloody bullshit DJKQ, you're a broken record. Absolutely infuriating. How many times have we covered this????? If landlords can't pay the mortgage, they sell the property and that drives the market down. What you want, yeah? Do you not get this? Why do you keep on parading the same bullshit over and over again? You have an incredibly myopic view of the market that's based on 'one' transaction. Markets are based on multiple transactions over greater period. I'm not going away, every time you say it I'll remind you how stupid it is. Every time you say it you'll go down in my estimation.

Why do you need to know Odyssey? Why does the admin need to be 'open'?

So long as they're not claustrophobic. I'm not claustrophobic myself, but I could feel the weight of the city on me. Cheesy Gordon's photo: http://www.gordonswinebar.com/photos/phot796.jpg

So do teachers not think they should be measured at all? How cruel a world that, where the judges refused to be judged? If teachers do accept some sort of meritocracy, on what criteria should it be set? Please be specfic, citing your sources. You have 60 minutes.